L'ouverture par les cartes dans les récits réalistes et les fables de Rudyard Kipling
Résumé
In Rudyard Kipling’s work, the cartographic imagination is both structuring and fertile. In order to account for the various uses of maps in his work, this article considers three types of maps in particular: the map added by the editors as an appendix to the narrative to help the reader; the map created by the author, as foretext or illustration, and whose link with the narrative is more intimate; and finally, the map created by a character in the diegesis and reproduced opposite the narrative in which that character appears. Kipling uses maps as tools to construct the referentiality of literary space and mental representations oriented by a colonial vision of the territory, thus elaborating a creative space that allows fiction to unfold. By observing how these maps play with the codes of cartography, this study seeks to understand how the Kiplingian map manages to represent the space of diversity and vagrancy, even as it formally evokes a colonial context, in which the map is a tool of categorization, seemingly unlikely to lead to openness. These maps do not claim to be scientific; they play with the boundary between reality and fiction, and with the conventions of travel and adventure narratives; they provoke a questioning of the boundaries of the fictional text, opening it up to an abundance of additional micro-narratives.